Stranger Things is a Netflix sci-fi horror series created by the Duffer Brothers, set in 1980s Indiana, where a group of young friends witness supernatural forces and secret government exploits. As they search for answers, the children unravel a series of extraordinary mysteries, making it a fascinating watch and a record breaking television series on Netflix. Since the last episode of the series came out on December 31, 2025, it has accumulated a mass of over 1.2 billion views, and achieved the biggest English-language premiere week of 59.6 million views. The series consists of five seasons with forty-two episodes, with the first episode released on July 15, 2016, and the finale releasing a decade later on December 31, 2025.
The long awaited ending of Stranger Things season five came out in three separate parts. Volume 1, consisting of the first four episodes, released on November 26, 2025; Volume 2, consisting of the next three episodes, released on December 25, 2025; and the series finale released on December 31, 2025. With the release of Volume 2 and the finale, a large majority of the fans felt disappointed with the ending, and felt like there was something missing from the story. Fans began to notice several inconsistencies in the storyline and visual details in the show that seemed too intentional to be a coincidence. When the Duffer Brothers mentioned to pay close attention to the details of the show, fans took that seriously, and the theory called Conformity Gate emerged across social media.
The theory proposed that a secret ninth episode would be released on January 7th, 2026, and that the original season finale was fake. The reasoning behind this is that the main antagonist monster, Vecna, constantly used his powers to manipulate the characters throughout the storyline before being defeated in the end. Fans proposed that he may have not actually died, and that his powers were able to break the fourth wall and manipulate the viewers too. These fans believed that what was shown in the epilogue of the finale was just a distorted reality, which Vecna used to convince the viewers that all the characters were able to get a happy ending. Many fans discredited this theory, concluding that a fake finale being used to set up a hidden episode was far too broad of a television idea for the Duffer Brothers to pull off. However, others tried to prove those people wrong, backing up their findings with multitudes of evidence.
Vecna, in his human form, had the name of Henry. Henry had an iconic stance and held his hands a certain way, and that same stance was used by a victim of his in Season 3 named Billy. This is important, because in the final graduation scene of the main protagonists, everyone was in that iconic stance, making viewers believe that the scene of all those people was just a part of Vecna’s imagination. This theme of fans believing that the characters were behaving similarly to Vecna continued, when two main characters named Mike and Nancy, and their parents, all had the same hairstyle worn by Henry.
The number seven was a repeated theme throughout the seasons. In one of the main settings of the story, the Upside Down, there were lighting strikes every seven seconds. When a main character, Steve, had a fake death falling off of a radio tower, the screen went black for seven seconds. In the very first episode, one of the protagonists, Will, rolls a die that lands on the number seven while playing D&D with the other main protagonists; Mike, Lucas, and Dustin. When Will landed a seven, that caused him to lose the game, and he was later taken by a monster called a demogorgon. That same die on the number seven was shown in the credits of the finale, meaning that the characters lost. When Will was finally found, it ended up taking seven days, and January 7th was seven days after the finale. Netflix had said that they were planning to make an announcement on the seventh, and Stranger Things had posted the picture of a clock that pointed to one and seven on social media.
In the epilogue, Steve becomes a baseball coach, despite viewers only have ever seen him playing basketball. However, Vecna is unaware of that, and has only ever seen Steve using a baseball bat as a weapon. Vecna also went by another name besides Henry–Mr. Whatsit, which was a reference to the novel A Wrinkle in Time. The board game “Whatzit” was seen in Mike’s basement, and in the cabin of the police chief, Hopper. The first time viewers saw this board game was when a demogorgon kidnapped Mike’s little sister, Holly, which was a significant part of the Season 5 storyline. An important character in the finale, Vickie, was not shown in the epilogue whatsoever, and fans believed that that was because Vecna had never met her before. The final scene of Mike walking up the stairs of his basement and through the door was what appeared to be an allusion to the final shot of the Truman Show, which is a movie about a fake reality. David Bowie’s “Heroes” played in the finale credits, and was also played in the previous episodes where there was a fake death.
Although the Conformity Gate theory was disproven, fans had reason to believe in what could have been the greatest stunt a television show ever pulled. From the countless pieces of evidence, to a scene where Lucas looked at the camera–breaking the fourth wall–saying that he didn’t believe in coincidences, many viewers felt disappointed in the whole Stranger Things franchise and storyline. Guadalupe Saldivar, a sophomore at Saugus High School, says, “I thought the endings was a tad bit predictable, and I felt like the Duffer Brothers didn’t have the skill to make the finale beautiful and represent the show that fans fell in love with, but I don’t think that it was the worst.”
